Story Dynamics – Stories

Of all the books written about storytelling, can you think of a single one that opposes storytelling?

But now we have Christian Salmon’s “Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind,” published in March, 2010.

Salmon doesn’t just hate storytelling. He thinks storytelling is dangerous and disruptive to modern civilization.

That’s the best news I’ve heard in our decades of trying to spread the word about storytelling. Our movement is finally big enough to be someone’s target.

The power of stories comes through scenes. But finding them can be a problem. Interestingly, the problem is similar, whether you are searching for the scenes to tell in your own story or trying to elicit a story from someone else.

Part of the solution is to temporarily suspend worrying about including irrelevant details – so that you can focus completely on finding the details that will make your story memorable.

How do we describe different styles of coaching – objectively and clearly? This article sets out four pairs of roles. The way these roles are each assigned specifies important parts about coaching styles. As a bonus, these also help distinguish styles of directing and interviewing.

This is an expanded version – with summary tables – of the article “Four Roles for Storytellers – and For Those Who Help Them“

When we storytellers talk about the power of stories, we usually think of the stories we ourselves tell. To be sure, those stories are important and powerful.

But there’s a trend emerging that features another kind of story: the kind told by ordinary individuals about events or things that have affected their lives. Let’s call those “personal encounter stories.”

Personal encounter stories have some very practical uses. At the same time, they are easily overlooked…

Stories are powerful. They have been used since prehistoric times and have an important role in the modern organization.
But most business leaders have been trained not to talk in stories. Instead, they have been trained to talk in bullet points, to “cut to the chase,” to get to the core concept.
As a result, stories can [...]

Listening to a radio interview about Haiti earthquake relief, I realized the three qualities of a message that made me take immediate action. Can a knowledge of these qualities improve your ability to use storytelling to motivate?

Here at my home near Boston, we just had our first major snowstorm. The nights are long now and the days are cold.

Given how dark and cold it feels, it’s easy to ignore the solstice, which occurred without fanfare yesterday at 5:45 pm. Nothing flashy happened. It was dark before 5:45; it was dark afterward. And, after all, the solstice happens every year.

But the solstice can be a reminder that events go in cycles, undulating like waves. And story can be a powerful reminder…

In storytelling, paradoxes abound.

In every case of paradox, we need to notice not just the effect we intend to create, but also the potentially opposite effect.

Continuously noticing the effects of our storytelling like this is demanding and sometimes unsettling. But it can also help our telling.

This article looks at three paradoxes that concern meaning – and how they might affect our storytelling.

Imagining is the most important storytelling skill. If you cannot imagine a story, then you have nothing to communicate.

The words of a story are much less important: they are just a medium through which you stimulate others to imagine. In this sense, words are like a fireplace: the container that shapes the fire and makes it efficient, not the fuel that burns.

But, in another sense, imagining is the act that puts you in contact with the unknown…